U.S. Media Mocked Abroad for Reporting False Name of California Shooting Suspect

Major American news outlets, including The Los Angeles Times and Fox News, were ridiculed online on Thursday for apparently falling victim to a hoax as they reported that a suspect in the deadly shooting rampage in San Bernardino, Calif., had been identified as Tayyeep Bin Ardogan, 28, of Qatar.

Not long after the name first appeared on Twitter, where it was posted by a self-described conservative blogger who claimed to have heard it on a police scanner, Turkish and Arabic speakers began pointing out that it seemed like an obvious prank, as it was constructed by mashing together names from the two languages to produce something comically absurd.

Several observers also pointed out that the made-up name seemed like an attempt to associate Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president, with terrorism in general and Osama bin Laden in particular.

Mr. Erdogan, who is currently reviled by both Russian and Syrian bloggers for supporting Islamist rebels in Syria, happened to have been visiting Qatar on Wednesday.

Turkey’s president has been a target of particular vitriol from Russians since he defended Turkey’s downing of a Russian warplane that was carrying out airstrikes in Syria last week. Some of the messages posted online on Thursday appeared to use the mistaken identification of the shooting suspect in California to further a campaign to portray Mr. Erdogan as an ally of Islamic State militants in Syria.

The precise source of the hoax name remains unclear, but Mr. Erdogan also has enemies in the United States. Fethullah Gulen, an influential Muslim cleric whose millions of followers once supported Mr. Erdogan, now lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania.

Once the Turkish media awoke to the news, journalists there took delight in reporting that their counterparts in the United States had apparently been “trolled” by a successful prankster.